Steven Zahniser

United States Department of Agriculture | USDA · Market and Trade Economics Division

Agricultural trade between the United States and Mexico underwent many changes in 2020 in the face of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Overall, U.S. agricultural exports to Mexico declined in April 2020 and did not recover until November 2020. Meanwhile, U.S. agricultural imports from Mexico declined in April and May 2020 before resuming their...

This report explores the performance of U.S. agricultural exports to Colombia over the past decade (2009-19), giving emphasis to leading product categories that show opportunities for further export expansion. Increasing income, an expanding middle class, and dietary changes have led to greater demand for the types of agricultural products imported...

Mexico is the largest foreign market for U.S. corn in terms of export volume and value. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), implemented in 1994, facilitated closer integration of the U.S. and Mexican corn markets, as evidenced by rising exports to Mexico and the co-movement of U.S. and Mexican prices. Since the start of 2008, U.S. corn...

The U.S. farm labor market shows many signs of tightening, including producer reports of labor shortages, increases in farm wages, more employment of guest workers through the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program, and a shrinking supply of farm labor from rural Mexico—the source of most foreign-born farmworkers in the United States. Mexico’s farm la...

The volume of world agricultural trade has grown fairly steadily since 1995, driven by substantial growth in world population and income, among other factors. Developing countries now account for a much larger share of the marketplace, both as exporters and importers. Applied tariffs on agricultural imports average about 15 percent. Multilateral tr...

This report uses a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to explore the economic effects of a hypothetical 10-percent increase in foreign demand for U.S. agricultural exports. This demand shift was found to result in a 6.7-percent increase in the volume of such exports, worth $9.7 billion at 2013 prices, and a net increase in total U.S. employ...

This report provides an overview of the U.S.-Mexico sweetener market and explains how the agreements suspending the U.S. antidumping and countervailing duty investigations on sugar imports from Mexico are likely to reshape this market. The analysis considers the circumstances leading up to the investigations, including how the North American Free T...

Este artículo explora algunas maneras de facilitar el comercio agrope-cuario México-Estados Unidos, enfocándose en los procesos y procedi-mientos en la frontera que rigen este comercio. Se llevaron a cabo 80 entrevistas en ambos países con expertos del sector privado, el gobierno y la academia. Con la información recopilada en estas entrevistas y l...

This article estimates the trade-reducing effects of the retaliatory import tariffs imposed by Mexico on selected U.S. agricultural products from March 2009 to October 2011 as part of the U.S.-Mexico trucking dispute. Using an autoregressive distributed-lag time series model of the targeted agricultural exports, we find that the tariffs reduced U.S...

Establishment of a more normal economic relationship with Cuba has the potential to foster additional growth in U.S.-Cuba agricultural trade. Prior to the Cuban Revolution of 1959, bilateral agricultural trade featured large volumes of Cuban sugar and smaller volumes of molasses, tobacco, and pineapple from Cuba and rice, lard, dried beans, wheat,...

This report examines the integration of North America's agricultural and food markets as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), implemented in 1994. NAFTA has had a profound effect on many aspects of North American agriculture over the past two decades. With a few exceptions, intraregional agricultural trade is now completely...

We estimated US banana demand disaggregated by exporting country using the generalised dynamic Rotterdam model. Results indicated that dynamic factors, prices, and total expenditures played an important role in determining how the USA allocated banana imports across supplying countries. We were particularly interested in Guatemala's emergence as th...

There is an ongoing trend in North American agricultural trade policy towards super-regional free trade agreements (FTAs) with economies in other parts of the world and deeper integration within the free trade area formed by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). We explore several examples of super-regional initiatives in which one or mo...

The proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a trade and investment agreement under negotiation by 12 countries in the Pacific Rim, including the United States. This report assesses the potential impacts of eliminating all agricultural and nonagricultural tariffs and tariff-rate quotas (TRQs) under a TPP agreement on the region's agriculture in...

The U.S. dry bean sector is unique among the Nation's field crops. In terms of its large farms, capital intensity, and strong export orientation, the sector resembles the U.S. grain and oilseeds sector, and many dry bean farmers in the United States also produce grains or oilseeds. Unlike grains and oilseeds, however, the dry bean sector has experi...

The FLS is a semi-annual telephone survey of a representative sample of about 12,000 farms that collects information on employment, wages, and hours for nonsupervisory field and livestock workers, as well as for supervisors and all other types of farm employees, such as bookkeepers and pilots. The FLS's strength is its ability to estimate both wage...

Policymakers are considering changes to U.S. immigration law that would affect the market for hired farm labor--including mandatory use of an Internet-based employment eligibility verification system and an expanded program for temporary nonimmigrant foreign-born farmworkers. Labor is an important input to U.S. agriculture--accounting for about 17...

Changes to U.S. immigration laws and policies could alter the supply of foreign-born labor to all industries, including agriculture. As of March 2010, unauthorized immigrants accounted for 5.2% of the U.S. civilian labor force, according to estimates by Passell and Cohn (2011). In crop agriculture, this proportion is much higher: 48% of hired farmw...

Large shifts in the supply of foreign-born, hired farm labor resulting from substantial changes in U.S. immigration laws or policies could have significant economic implications. A computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of the U.S. economy is used to evaluate how changes in the supply of foreign-born labor might affect all sectors of the econom...

Large shifts in the supply of foreign-born farm labor, such as those that might result from substantial changes to the US immigration law or its enforcement, could have important implications for the US agriculture. The reasons for the H-2A program's limited use are varied. The program is only for temporary or seasonal workers, so dairy, livestock,...

Free trade is deeply rooted within North America’s agricultural economy. Canada, Mexico, and the United States gradually removed thousands of barriers to regional agricultural trade from 1994 to 2008 as part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). From 1989 to 1993, Canada and the United States pursued agricultural trade liberalizatio...

EU Environmental Sustainability Requirements and Brazilian Biofuel ExportsThis article explores the EU's goal to obtain 10 per cent of its transport energy from biofuels by 2020 and considers how the environmental sustainability criteria in the EU's new renewable energy directive might apply to Brazil. In order to count towards the goal, biofuels m...

With the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) nearly complete, there are concerns that the easy gains in efficiency have been achieved and that additional steps towards the economic integration of the member countries are required. This poses a distinct challenge to the NAFTA governments, since the agreement did not cre...

With the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) nearly complete, there are concerns that the easy gains in efficiency have been achieved and that additional steps towards the economic integration of the member countries are required. This poses a distinct challenge to the NAFTA governments, since the agreement did not cre...

The sustained increase in U.S. ethanol production is eventually require adjustments in the corn market, as corn is the primary feedstock for U.S. ethanol production. USDA Agricultural Baseline Projections suggests that much of the increase use by ethanol producers will be diverted from potential exports. The growing corn demand of ethanol producers...

Free trade is deeply rooted within North America’s agricultural economy. Canada, Mexico, and the United States gradually removed thousands of barriers to regional agricultural trade from 1994 to 2008 as part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). From 1989 to 1993, Canada and the United States pursued agricultural trade liberalizatio...

The United States, Mexico, and Canada have each made significant changes to their agricultural policies over the past several years. In the area of income supports, each country has instituted a countercyclical program that provides additional assistance to producers during downturns in commodity prices, and each continues to decouple key support p...

The beef, pork, and poultry industries of Mexico, Canada, and the United States have tended to become more economically integrated over the past two decades. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had a large role in this integration. NAFTA did little to integrate North American dairy markets or Canadian poultry markets with the rest of No...

This paper surveys the economic literature about North American integration in the agri-food sector. The purpose of this survey is two-fold: it summarizes the lessons learned, and it identifies areas where further research could provide valuable input into policy discussions. As the integration of North American agriculture progresses, the range of...

Although the growing U.S.-Mexico corn trade has changed significantly since the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, it retains many of its pre-trade-liberalization characteristics. The majority of U.S. corn exports to Mexico still consists of yellow corn, which is primarily used as an ingredient in animal feed. From 1...

Experience with the regional trade agreements already in effect in the Western Hemisphere sug- gests that the trade effects of the FTAA will exceed the impact of its tariff and quota changes. For instance, to the extent that the FTAA requires closer cooperation on sanitary and phytosani- tary issues, as is the case with the North American Free Trad...

The purpose of this paper is to show how Mexican hog producers can take advantage of NAFTA in order to increase their competitiveness. In particular, lowering feed costs, improving transportation facilities, and establishing greater control over swine diseases would go a long way towards increasing the competitiveness of Mexican producers.

This paper evaluates the impact of various explanatory factors on temporary rural-to-urban migration in China using a series of probit models of the migration decision. The empirical basis of this work is a sample of 11 924 individuals, age 16-35 years, drawn from the 1995 data of the Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP). We find that the profil...

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This book focuses on labour used in agriculture in the USA, Canada and Australia. Changes in the hired farm workforce, area studies and community impacts and responses, and the need for community services, are discussed. It is divided into 3 sections. Section 1 provides an overview of changes in agricultural employment in developed countries, trend...

This article employs a unique logit model developed by Yamaguchi to study Mexican migration to the United States. The model contains interaction terms between the previous year's migration decision and key explanatory variables. This innovation allows for the differential measurement of the variables' influence on the Mexico-to-U.S. and the U.S.-to...

"This article uses a unique set of pooled cross-sectional and time series data to examine the annual rate of U.S. immigration during 1972-1991 from 60 source countries. One distinguishing feature of the article is that it breaks out and cross-classifies various classes of immigrants--numerically limited versus numerically exempt and new immigrant v...

This article uses a unique set of pooled cross-sectional and rime series data to examine the annual rate of U.S, immigration during 1972-1991 from 60 source countries. One distinguishing feature of the article is that it breaks out and cross-classifies various classes of immigrants-numerically limited versus numerically exempt and new immigrant ver...

If migrants return to their origin countries, two questions arise which are of immediate economic interest for both immigration and emigration country: What determines their optimal migration duration, and what are the activities migrants choose after a return. Little research has been devoted to these two issues. This paper utilises a unique surve...

U.S. banana demand differentiated by country of origin is estimated using the generalized dynamic Rotterdam model. Results indicate that dynamic factors play a significant role in determining the allocation of U.S. banana expenditures across exporting sources. Of particular interest is Guatemala’s increased share and Costa Rica’s decreased share of...

The authors thank Mary Anne Normile and others for their comments and suggestions. Any opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of the institutions with which they are affiliated.

The United States is engaged in agricultural trade liberalization in two different types of venues. At the multilateral level, the U.S. is an active participant in the current round of world trade negotiations, called the Doha Development Agenda or Doha Round, at the World Trade Organization (WTO). The Doha Round opened in 2001 and is scheduled to...